For those of you, who just do programming for the heck of it – this is nothing new to you. For everyone else: there are certain programming languages that don’t make any common sense!
Well, probably every one has come across some code, that was to certain means unreadable. Sometimes this is not intended, other times it’s fully intentionally. Perl offers a whole lot of potential to write unreadable code, since you have quite a few “shortcuts” to variables and you can just stuff everything in one line.
This little fellow is just one nice example:
sub b{[@b=(abs||No,bottle."s"x!!++$_,of,beer),on,the,wall]}print "@{+b}.\n@b,\nTake one down, pass it around,\n@{+b}.\n" for-pop||-99..-1
So, did you recognize it – or did you try it?
For those of you, whom Perl is not offering enough – you might want to try some other languages. While it only takes a couple of seconds to write a programm to add two numbers using C or perl, you can spend a couple of hours accomplishing the same with INTERCAL. Or for example Whitespace, this language only uses Space, Tabs and LineFeeds, so all of which are non-visible characters!
I’ve listed some of them: